I think I am not the only one who is not so happy with the lesson splits as they are right now. I don’t know if it is really necessary for you to do them from a technical point of view, but in any case, I want to propose what you could improve easily to make the system more transparent to the user.
First: What is the problem? Podcast episodes or book chapters get split at completely unnecessary points. Sometimes LingQ just imports the first part or in other cases, the middle part is missing. Especially for normal podcast lengths of 30 minutes to an hour, this feels quite inconvenient.
My suggestion:
For manual lesson creation show the user how many words his lesson has and at what point it would get split.
Give them the option to decide whether the lesson gets split after for instance 1000, 2000 or 4000 words. When my lesson has 2120 words I don’t want it to get split after 2000 words.
Make it easier to edit a user-created lesson. It is too strenuous right now to add or shorten text. At this point 4.0 was a lot more comfortable.
Amen to that. I, along with other users, have been raising this issue for months.
2000 words is very little. 5000 would be a more reasonable limit.
This split was introduced years ago because the lessons were too long and were putting strain onto the database and consuming resources such as bandwidth etc. But surely, technology has improved considerably since then and alternatives can and should be considered.
The way lessons are split currently also present a problem when you have lessons involving text + audio because they don’t match.
That 2000 word split limit feels like having to put up with MS DOS when Windows 11 is available out there.
What’s nice about the lesson split being short is when you accidently toggle between sentence mode and paragraph mode and it resets the lesson all the way at the beginning, so it makes it faster to read to the point where you were previously.
Which I guess is another bug hahah (unless it’s supposed to do that…?)
But yeah, having larger lessons would be nice, as there are so many times i’ve imported stuff and it gets out of sync and I have to go back and manually organize them. And I’ve found chapters of books are usually 2-3 LingQ segments, rarely just one.
I’ve been in the habit of reading a chapter then importing a chapter if they are long, rather than doing a bunch in one go (which would be more convenient).
I don´t have any thought on where to split the lesson, but I have to say that I have just been pleasantly surprised. I haven´t imported a lesson that got split for a long, long time - could be several upgrades ago! Anyway, I just imported a lesson that was split, and to my very pleasant surprise, I found that the audio got split as well…at the right place. It used to be that, if you really wanted everything neat and cozy, you had to see where your lesson was split, and then goin and split your audio at that place yourself. It was quite annoying.
I don’t think anyone would oppose an option for having longer LingQ lessons. I would especially welcome if LingQ would respect the chapter markers in ebook files and split the lessons accordingly.
Regarding the performance argument, I do have one very long lesson at 13.764 words, I created it by accident a couple of months back. While it appeared glacially slow when I first opened it, trying it now it appears there have been some definite performance improvements because this lesson now opens in a reasonable time (29 seconds) and navigating from one term to the next using the arrow keys takes little more than a second. So it appears a somewhat sluggish but is actually usable. Maybe the limit will be raised once LingQ finds the performance acceptable.
As a counterpoint (for myself, and maybe others), I like the shorter length. Especially if it’s arbitrary anyway.
First of all…absolutely the speed of import needs to happen a lot quicker. In 4.0 everything was ready and available on a long book right away. Having only one chapter available for hours is not good. I hope there’s something that can be done to speed that up (not sure what’s changed as far as that goes).
Back to the shorter length. I really hate long chapters in books personally. I like a place where I can read for 5-10 minutes and there’s an “end”. 2000 is already a bit long for these pacing. 5000 would make me feel like there’s never an end. Just a personal preference.
One thing that does make a potentially longer chapter more reasonable in 5.0 is the auto words read count. It sometimes takes me a couple of days to finish a chapter. It is nice to have a tally going, rather than having this count get updated after a couple of days (which is what it usually takes me to get through a chapter based on my time limits).